Porn star Isabelle Lagace pleads guilty to smuggling cocaine worth £18 MILLION into Australia on a cruise ship that set sail from UK

Two women, from Quebec, had boarded the luxury cruise ship in Southampton in June

BY SAM WEBB AND CANDACE SUTTON FOR NEWS.COM.AU

16th December 2016, 2:38 pm

Updated: 17th December 2016, 6:18 am

A FORMER porn star has pleaded guilty to trying to smuggle cocaine worth £18million into Australia on a cruise ship.

Canadian Isabelle Lagace, 28, and 23-year-old Melina Roberge were part of a seven-member drug cartel aboard the MS Sea Princess as it cruised from New York via Tahiti to Sydney carrying 95kg of cocaine, a court heard today.

But she said Ms Roberge had booked her ticket for the trip with another man who was not associated with the criminal enterprise behind the drug deal.

However, Ms Lagace and Mr Tamine had booked their cruise - which visited Colombia, French Polynesia Chile, Peru and New Zealand - together, Ms Mathur told the court.

Ms Mathur said that Ms Roberge should escape being committed for trial because she was only guilty by her association with Ms Lagace.

On CCTV footage of Ms Roberge embarking and disembarking the Sea Princess, she had “nothing in her possession except a wallet or mobile phone”.

Whereas Ms Lagace, who carried both an iPhone and BlackBerry — known as a device “that is impossible to decode” — had allegedly told investigators “you won’t be getting that” when they asked for its password.

Ms Mathur said that Ms Lagace had admitted at one point that she owned the suitcase in which cocaine was later found.

Crown Prosecutor Lincoln Crowley told the court that although the Crown case against Ms Roberge was circumstantial, she and Ms Lagace had travelled for more than a month in a tiny ship’s cabin in which there was a suitcase packed with almost 30kg of cocaine.

“The cocaine, 29kg of it, was found in a cabin occupied by Ms Roberge and Ms Lagace for the past 40 days, packed up, strapped up, taped up and sitting in a suitcase and would be worth a considerable amount of money,” Mr Crowley told the court.

“Two women are minding the cocaine. Ms Lagace and Ms Roberge are warehousing a quantity of cocaine.

“It is in effect a floating warehouse. They are sitting on this until they get to Australia.”

Mr Crowley said the drug found in a Swiss suitcase in the girls’ cabin was in layers of Clipseal plastic bags tied up with masking tape.